6 Summary

The first part of this course has provided an introduction to the field of practice called systems thinking in practice, or STiP. This is the knowledge and skills relevant for doing systems thinking in practice. The ideas about reflection in this course invited you to use your own personal experience as a major resource.

Systems thinking is an alternative way of managing human interventions associated with socio-economic and environmental development. The course has outlined the characteristics of systems thinking, the reasons why systems thinking might provide better support for making sense of the world, and introduced the knowledge and skills relevant for doing systems thinking in practice.

This part of the course has provided some insights into how managing change and making sense of the complex and conflicted ‘way of the world’ is understood by a practitioner using STiP. It has outlined how to begin an inquiry into your own experience of practice, so as to acknowledge, value and articulate your prior experience and its concerns. It has also introduced systemic inquiry as a mode of practice for effecting change with STiP to create change that is systemically desirable as well as culturally feasible. The course invited you to consider the two forms of practice systematic andsystemic which together constitute ‘systems thinking in practice’. It has been suggested that for beneficial change to take place, the people who are attempting it need to have a systemic sensibility, systems literacy and STiP capability. It has explained the idea of praxis, the theory-informed practical action that constitutes STiP. Managing change has been conceptualised as learning a process of finding out through inquiry action, which may require a reframing of issues.

The idea of systemic failure has been explored, often involving some sort of breakdown in the connectedness, or limitations in thinking and practices. The course introduces ideas about managing change in ways to avoid systemic failure and associated unintended consequences through developing and deploying STiP capabilities.

This first part of the course concluded by outlining an inquiry into your practice – how to undertake a systemic inquiry by re-examining the PFMS heuristic and appreciated the importance of the practitioner adopting what is described as a second-order or reflexive perspective on their own practice. The second-order perspective will be crucial as you head into the second part of this course, where you will learn about two influential approaches for co-inquiry in Learning systems: Critical Social Learning Systems (CSLS) and Communities of Practice (CoP).